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Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about

language, learning and cognition
Susan Goldin-Meadow
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2014 369, 20130295, published 4 August 2014

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Research
Cite this article: Goldin-Meadow S. 2014
Widening the lens: what the manual modality
reveals about language, learning and
cognition. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0295
One contribution of 12 to a Theme Issue
‘Language as a multimodal phenomenon:
implications for language learning, processing
and evolution’.
Subject Areas:
cognition
Keywords:
homesign, co-speech gesture, gesture– speech
mismatch, Nicaraguan Sign Language
Author for correspondence:
Susan Goldin-Meadow
e-mail: sgm@uchicago.edu
Widening the lens: what the manual
modality reveals about language,
learning and cognition
Susan Goldin-Meadow
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
The goal of this paper is to widen the lens on language to include the manual
modality. We look first at hearing children who are acquiring language from a
spoken language model and find that even before they use speech to com-
municate, they use gesture. Moreover, those gestures precede, and predict, the
acquisition of structures in speech. We look next at deaf children whose hearing
losses prevent them from using the oral modality, and whose hearing parents
have not presented them with a language model in the manual modality.
These children fall back on the manual modality to communicate and use ges-
tures, which take on many of the forms and functions of natural language.
These homemade gesture systems constitute the first step in the emergence of
manual sign systems that are shared within deaf communities and are full-
fledged languages. We end by widening the lens on sign language to include
gesture and find that signers not only gesture, but they also use gesture in learning
contexts just as speakers do. These findings suggest that what is key in gesture’s
ability to predict learning is its ability to add a second representational format to
communication, rather than a second modality. Gesture can thus be language,
assuming linguistic forms and functions, when other vehicles are not availa-
ble; but when speech or sign is possible, gesture works along with language,
providing an additional representational format that can promote learning.
1. Introduction
Children around the globe learn to speak with surprising ease. But they are not just
learning to speak—they are also learning how to use their hands as they speak.
They are learning to gesture. We know that in adult speakers, gesture forms a
single system with speech and is an integral part of the communicative act [1,2].
In this paper, my goal is to widen the lens on language learning to include the
manual modality—to include gesture. I begin by examining the language-learning
trajectory when it is viewed with this wider lens. The central finding is that children
display skills earlier in development than they do when the focus is only on speech.
They can, for example, express sentence-like ideas in a gesture–speech combi-
nation several months before they express these ideas in speech alone. Gesture
thus provides insight into the earliest steps a language-learner takes and might
even play a role in getting the learner to take those steps.
I then consider what happens if a child does not have access to the oral modality
and has only the manual modality to use in communication. Deaf children who are
exposed to input from a language in the manual modality, that is, an established
sign language like American Sign Language (ASL), learn that language as naturally
as hearing children exposed to input from a language in the oral modality [3,4]. But
90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents [5], who typically do not know a
sign language and want their deaf child to learn a spoken language. Even when
given intensive instruction in the oral modality, children with severe to profound
hearing losses typically are not able to make use of the spoken language that sur-
rounds them [6,7]. If, in addition, they do not have access to a sign language, the
children are likely to turn to gesture to communicate. Under these circumstances,
the manual modality steps in and gesture assumes the roles typically played by
the oral modality—it takes over the forms and functions of language and becomes
a system of homesigns that display many of the characteristics found in established
& 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
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sign languages. Gesture can thus become language under the
right circumstances, although it grows into a fully complex
linguistic system only with the support of a community that
can pass the system along to the next generation. By observing
the steps a manual communication system takes as it become
a fully elaborated sign language, we can gain insight into the
factors that have shaped human language.
I end by asking what it might mean to widen the lens on
language in the manual modality, that is, to look at gesture pro-
duced along with sign language. Signers do gesture when they
sign [8]. Like the gestures that accompany speech, the gestures
that accompany sign are analogue in form, and thus comp-
lement the discrete, segmented categories found in sign (and
speech). But, unlike gesture and speech, gesture and sign are pro-
duced in the same (manual) modality. The question I ask is
whether the gestures that accompany sign play the same role
in learning as the gestures that accompany speech. Addressing
this question allows us to determine whether gesture’s impor-
tance in learning stems from the fact that it is produced in a
different modality from speech or from the fact that it represents
information in a qualitatively different format from speech.
What I hope to show is that widening the lens on language
to include the manual modality gives us deeper insight into the
nature and the time course of language learning and learning
in general, and can also give us insight into the relationship
between language and cognition. In addition, by investigat-
ing how the manual modality can be used to create language
(as in homesign and emergent sign languages), we open a
window onto language that lets us identify properties of
language that are so ‘resilient’ that they can be developed
even by a single user versus properties of language that are
more fragile, and that require a community of users, and
perhaps generations of learners, to emerge.
2. Widening the lens on spoken language
learning to include the manual modality
(a) The gestures that accompany speech selectively
predict linguistic milestones
I begin by examining the gestures that hearing children pro-
duce in the process of learning spoken language. At a time in
development when children are limited in the words they
know and use, gesture offers a way for them to extend their
communicative range. Children typically begin to gesture
between eight and 12 months [9,10], first producing deictic
gestures ( pointing at objects, people and places in the
immediate environment, or holding up objects to draw atten-
tion to them), and later at around 26 months [11] producing
iconic gestures that capture aspects of the objects, action or
attributes they represent (e.g. flapping arms to refer to a
bird or to flying [12]). The fact that gesture allows children
to communicate meanings that they do not yet express in
speech opens up the possibility that gesturing itself facilitates
language learning. If so, changes in gesture should not only
predate, but they should also predict, changes in language.
And they do, both for words and for sentences (table 1).
(i) Nouns and verbs
The more a child gestures early on, the more words are likely
to be found in the child’s vocabulary later in development
[13–16]. Even more compelling, we can predict which particu- 2
lar nouns will enter a child’s verbal vocabulary by looking at
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the objects that the child indicated using deictic gestures sev-
eral months earlier [17]. For example, a child who does not
know the word ‘cat’, but communicates about cats by pointing
at them is likely to learn the word ‘cat’ within three months
[17]. Gesture paves the way for children’s early nouns.
However, gesture does not appear to pave the way for
early verbs—although we might have expected iconic ges-
tures that depict actions to precede, and predict, the onset
of verbs, they do not. Özçalışkan et al. [11] observed spon-
taneous speech and gestures in 40 English-learning children
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
from ages 14 to 34 months and found that the children pro-
duced their first iconic gestures for actions six months later
than their first verbs. The onset of iconic gestures conveying
action meanings thus followed, rather than preceded, chil-
dren’s first verbs.1 But iconic gestures did increase in
frequency at the same time that verbs did and, at that time,
children used these action gestures to convey specific verb
meanings that they were not yet expressing in speech. Chil-
dren thus do use gesture to expand their repertoire of verb
meanings, but only after they have begun to acquire the
verb system underlying their language.
(ii) Sentences
Even though they treat gestures like words in some respects,
children learning a spoken language very rarely combine their
gestures with other gestures, and if they do, the phase tends to
be short-lived [19]. But children do often combine their gestures
with words, and they produce these gesture þ speech combi-
nations well before they produce word þ word combinations.
Children’s earliest gesture þ speech combinations contain
gestures that convey information that complements the infor-
mation conveyed in speech; for example, pointing at a ball
while saying ‘ball’ [20–24]. Soon after, children begin to pro-
duce combinations in which gesture conveys information that
is different from and supplements the information conveyed in
the accompanying speech; for example, pointing at a ball
while saying ‘here’ to request that the ball be moved to a
particular spot [19,22,25–28].
As in the acquisition of words, we find that changes in ges-
ture (in this case, changes in the relationship gesture holds to
the speech it accompanies) predict changes in language (the
onset of sentences). The age at which children first produce
supplementary gesture þ speech combinations (e.g. point at
box þ ‘open’, or GIVE gesture þ ‘bottle’) reliably predicts the
age at which they first produce two-word sentence-like utter-
ances (i.e. sentences containing a verb, e.g. ‘open box’, ‘give
bottle’) [17,29,30]. The age at which children first produce comp-
lementary gesture þ speech combinations (e.g. point at box þ
‘box’) does not. Moreover, supplementary combinations selec-
tively relate to the syntactic complexity of children’s later
sentences. Rowe & Goldin-Meadow [31] observed 52 children
from families reflecting the demographic range of Chicago and
found that the number of supplementary gesture þ speech com-
binations the children produced at 18 months reliably predicted
the complexity of their sentences (as measured by the Index of
Productive Syntax [32]) at 42 months, but the number of different
meanings they conveyed in gesture (where point at dog and point
at bottle are counted as conveying different meanings) at
18 months did not. Conversely, the number of different mean-
ings children conveyed in gesture at 18 months reliably
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Table 1. Examples of linguistic constructions preceded and predicted by gesture.
type of construction preceding construction containing gesture
nouns point at bear
complex nominal constituents point at cat þ ‘cat’
simple sentences
argument þ argument (entity-location) ‘a choo-choo train’ þ point at tunnel
argument þ predicate (actor-act) ‘baby’ þ EAT
argument þ predicate (act-patient) ‘hair’ þ WASH gesture
complex sentences
predicate þ predicate ‘did it really hard’ þ PRESS gesture
predicate þ predicate ‘you making me’ þ FALL gesture
predicted their spoken vocabulary (as measured by the PPVT
[33]) at 42 months, but the number of supplementary gesture þ
speech combinations they produced at 18 months did not. Ges-
ture is thus not merely an early index of global communicative
skill, but is a harbinger of specific linguistic steps that children
will soon take—early gesture words predict later spoken voca-
bulary, and early gesture sentences predict later spoken syntax.
Gesture does more than open the door to sentence con-
struction—the particular gesture þ speech combinations
children produce predict the onset of corresponding linguistic
milestones. Özçalışkan & Goldin-Meadow [34] observed 40 of
the children in the Rowe & Goldin-Meadow [31] sample at 14,
18 and 22 months and found that the types of supplementary
combinations the children produced changed over time and,
critically, presaged changes in their speech. For example, the
children began producing ‘two-verb’ complex sentences in
gesture þ speech combinations (‘I like it’ þ EAT gesture) several
months before they produced complex sentences entirely in
speech (‘help me find it’). Supplementary gesture þ speech
combinations thus continue to provide stepping-stones to
increasingly complex linguistic constructions.
Gesture does not, however, always predict transitions in
language learning. Gesture precedes and predicts linguistic
developments when those developments involve new con-
structions, but not when the developments involve fleshing
out existing constructions. For example, Özçalışkan & Goldin-
Meadow [35] found that the 40 children in their sample produced
combinations in which one modality conveyed a predicate and
the other conveyed an argument (e.g. WASH gesture þ ‘hair’ ¼
predicate in gesture þ object in speech) several months before
they produced predicate þ argument combinations entirely in
speech (e.g. ‘popped this balloon’ ¼ predicate þ object, both in
speech). However, once the basic predicate þ argument con-
struction had been acquired in speech, the children did not rely
on gesture to add arguments to the construction. Thus, the chil-
dren produced their first predicate þ 2 argument combinations
in speech (e.g. ‘I want the Lego’ ¼ agent þ predicate þ object,
all in speech) and in gesture þ speech (point at father þ ‘have
food’ ¼ agent in gesture þ predicate in speech þ object in
speech) at the same age [35].
(iii) Complex nominal constituents
As mentioned earlier, the age at which children first pro-
duce complementary gesture þ speech combinations in which
gesture indicates the object labelled in speech (e.g. point at
3
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subsequent construction
containing speech alone
‘bear’
‘the cat’
‘the cat in the tree’
‘mouse is swimming’
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
‘pull my diaper’
‘make my tape stop’
‘you make him fall’
cup þ ‘cup’) does not reliably predict the onset of two-word sen-
tence-like utterances [17], reinforcing the point that it is the
specific way in which gesture is combined with speech, rather
than the ability to combine gesture with speech per se, which sig-
nals the onset of future linguistic achievements. The gesture in a
complementary gesture þ speech combination has traditionally
been considered redundant with the speech it accompanies but,
gesture typically locates the object being labelled and, in this
sense, has a different function from speech [36]. Complementary
gesture þ speech combinations have, in fact, recently been
found to predict the onset of a linguistic milestone—but they
predict the onset of complex nominal constituents rather than
the onset of sentential constructions.
If children are using nouns to classify the objects they label (as
recent evidence suggests infants do when hearing spoken nouns
[37]), then producing a complementary point with a noun could
serve to specify an instance of that category. In this sense, a point-
ing gesture could be functioning like a determiner. Cartmill et al.
[38] analysed all of the utterances containing nouns produced by
18 children in Rowe & Goldin-Meadow’s [31] sample and
focused on (i) utterances containing an unmodified noun com-
bined with a complementary pointing gesture (e.g. point at
cup þ ‘cup’) and (ii) utterances containing a noun modified by
a determiner (e.g. ‘the/a/that cup’). They found that the age at
which children first produced complementary point þ noun
combinations selectively predicted the age at which the children
first produced determiner þ noun combinations.2 Not only
did complementary point þ noun combinations precede
and predict the onset of determiner þ noun combinations in
speech, but these point þ noun combinations also decreased
in number once children gained productive control over
determiner þ noun combinations. When children point to
and label an object simultaneously, they appear to be on
the cusp of developing an understanding of nouns as a
modifiable unit of speech, a complex nominal constituent.
(iv) Narratives
Gesture has also been found to predict changes in narrative
structure later in development. Demir et al. [39] asked 38 chil-
dren in the Rowe & Goldin-Meadow’s [31] sample to retell a
cartoon at age 5 and then again at ages 6, 7 and 8. Even at age
8, the children showed no evidence of being able to frame
their narratives from a character’s perspective in speech.
Taking a character’s first-person perspective on events has
been found, in adults, to be important for creating a coherent
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narrative representation [40]. Interestingly, many of the children,
even at age 5, did take a character’s viewpoint into account in
their gestures. For example, to describe a woodpecker’s actions,
one child moved her upper body and head back and forth, thus
assuming the perspective of the bird (as opposed to moving a
beak-shaped hand back and forth and taking the perspective
of someone looking at the bird, a skill that appears later in
development [2]). Moreover, the children who produced
character-viewpoint gestures at age 5 were more likely than
children who did not produce these gestures to go on to tell
well-structured stories (as measured by the narrative structure
coding system developed by Stein & Glenn [41]) in the later
years, even controlling for early syntactic skills and initial level
of narrative structure. Children were thus able to use gesture
to take on a character’s perspective before being able to do so
in speech, and those early gestures signalled upcoming develop-
ments in their spoken narrative production. Gesture thus
continues to act as a harbinger of change as it assumes new
roles in relation to discourse and narrative structure.
(b) The mechanisms underlying gesture’s role in
language learning
We have seen that early gesture predicts subsequent develop-
ments in speech across a range of linguistic constructions
(table 1). Interestingly, gesture plays this role not only for chil-
dren who are learning language at a typical pace, but also for
those who are experiencing delays. Children with unilateral
brain injury whose spoken language is delayed also display
delays in gesture. Child gesture thus has the potential to
serve as an early diagnostic tool, identifying which children
will exhibit subsequent language delays, and which will
catch up and fall within the normative range [42,43].
Why does early gesture selectively predict later spoken
vocabulary size and sentence complexity? At the least, gesture
reflects two separate abilities (word-learning and sentence
making) on which later linguistic abilities can be built. Expres-
sing many different meanings in gesture during development
is a sign that the child is going to be a good vocabulary learner,
and expressing many different types of gesture þ speech com-
binations is a sign that the child is going to be a good sentence
learner. The early gestures children produce thus reflect their
cognitive potential for learning particular aspects of language.
But early gesture could be doing more—it could be helping
children realize their potential. In other words, the act of
expressing meanings in gesture could be playing an active
role in helping children become better vocabulary learners,
and the act of expressing sentence-like meanings in gesture þ
speech combinations could be playing an active role in helping
children become better sentence learners. The next sections
explore this possibility.
(i) Gesture provides opportunities to practice conveying meanings
Child gesture could have an impact on language learning in at
least two ways. First, gesture gives children an opportunity to
practice producing particular meanings by hand at a time
when those meanings are difficult to express by mouth. We
know, for example, that early gesture use is related to later voca-
bulary size. In a mediation analysis, Rowe & Goldin-Meadow
[15] found that the relatively large vocabularies children from
high SES families display at 54 months can be partially
explained by child gesture use at 14 months. In turn, child
gesture use at 14 months can be explained by parent gesture 4
use at 14 months, even when parent speech is controlled.
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Importantly, parent gesture does not appear to have a direct
effect on subsequent child spoken vocabulary—the effect is
mediated through child gesture, suggesting that it is the act of
gesturing on the part of the child that is critical.
Although these findings suggest that child gesture is play-
ing a causal role in language learning, we need to manipulate
gesture to be certain of this claim. Previous work has found
that telling 9- and 10-year-old children to gesture when
explaining how they solved a math problem does, in fact,
make them particularly receptive to subsequent instruction
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
on that problem—the gesturing itself appears to be responsible
for their improved performance after instruction [44]. As
another example more relevant to language learning, LeBarton
et al. [45] studied 15 toddlers (beginning at 17 months) in an
eight-week at-home intervention study (six weekly training
sessions plus follow-up two weeks later) in which all children
were exposed to object words, but only some were told to point
at the named objects. Before each training session and at
follow-up, children interacted naturally with their parents to
establish a baseline against which changes in communication
were measured. Children who were told to gesture increased
the number of gesture meanings they conveyed not only
when interacting with the experimenter during training, but
also when later interacting with their parents. Critically,
these experimentally induced increases in gesture led to
larger spoken repertoires at follow-up. The findings suggest
that gesturing can play an active role in word-learning, perhaps
because gesturing to a target picture in the context of labelling
focuses children’s attention to objects in the environment, to
the labels, or to the object–label relation [46,47]. Children’s
active engagement in the bidirectional labelling context when
told to gesture may also draw their attention to gesture’s com-
municative function, which could also have beneficial
consequences for vocabulary development [48–51].
Although we know that encouraging children to point at
objects enhances word-learning, there have been no studies to
date encouraging children to produce supplementary gesture þ
speech combinations. We thus know only that early supplemen-
tary gesture þ speech combinations reflect the child’s readiness
to produce two-word utterances. More work is needed to deter-
mine whether these combinations play an active role in bringing
about the onset of two-word utterances.
(ii) Gesture elicits timely speech from listeners
The second way in which child gesture could play a role in
language learning is more indirect—child gesture could elicit
timely speech from listeners (e.g. [52]). Because gesture seems
to reflect a child’s readiness for acquiring a particular linguistic
structure, it has the potential to alert listeners (parents, teachers
and clinicians) to the fact that a child is ready to learn that word
or sentence. Listeners who pay attention to those gestures and
can ‘read’ them, might then adjust their talk, providing just
the right input to help the child learn the word or sentence.
Consider a child who does not yet know the word ‘rabbit’
and refers to the animal by pointing at it. His obliging
mother responds, ‘yes, that’s a rabbit’, thus supplying him
with just the word he is looking for. Or consider a child who
points at her mother while saying the word ‘hat’. Her mother
replies, ‘that’s mommy’s hat’, thus translating the child’s
gesture þ word combination into a simple sentence.
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Just as mothers are sensitive to whether their children are
familiar with the words they present, adjusting their strategies
to make the word comprehensible (e.g. linking the new word
to related words, offering terms that contrast with it directly, situ-
ating it by appealing to past experiences [53]), mothers are
sensitive to their children’s gestures [25,54]. Mothers translate
into their own words not only the single gestures that children
produce (e.g. ‘that’s a bird’, produced in response to the child’s
point at a bird), but also the gestures that children produce in
combination with words conveying different information, that
is, supplementary gesture þ speech combinations (‘the bird’s
taking a nap’, produced in response to the child’s point at
bird þ ‘nap’) [55]. Interestingly, mothers produce longer (and
potentially more syntactically complex) sentences in response
to their children’s supplementary gesture þ speech combi-
nations (point at bird þ ‘nap’) than to their complementary
gesture þ speech combinations (point at bird þ ‘bird’). More-
over, mothers’ sentences tend to be longest when they pick up
on information conveyed in child speech and gesture (e.g. ‘the
bird’s taking a nap’), despite the fact that they could easily have
produced sentences that are just as long when they pick up on
information conveyed only in the child’s speech (‘It’s time for
your nap’) or only in the child’s gesture (‘It’s just like grandma’s
bird’) or when they ignore the child’s utterance entirely (‘Let’s
read another book’) [55].
If child gesture is playing an instrumental role in language
learning, mothers’ translations ought to be related to later
word- and sentence-learning in their children—and they are
[55]. In terms of word-learning, when mothers translate the ges-
tures that their children produce into words, those words are
more likely to quickly become part of the child’s vocabulary
than words for gestures that mothers do not translate. In terms
of sentence-learning, children whose mothers frequently trans-
late their child’s gestures into speech tend to be first to produce
two-word utterances. The age at which children produce their
first two-word utterance is highly correlated with the proportion
of times mothers translate their child’s gestures into speech,
suggesting that mothers’ targeted responses to their children’s
gestures might be playing a role in helping the children take
their first steps into multiword combinations. Because they are
finely tuned to a child’s current state (cf. Vygotsky’s zone of prox-
imal development [56]), adult responses of this sort could be
particularly effective in teaching children how an idea is
expressed in the language they are learning.
3. When the manual modality is all that the
language-learner has
As described earlier, children whose hearing losses prevent
them from acquiring spoken language and whose hearing
parents have not exposed them to sign language turn to gesture
to communicate. These gestures, called homesigns, display many
of the properties found in the early communication systems that
hearing children learn from their spoken language models and
that deaf children learn from the signed language models [57].
(a) The linguistic milestones found in homesign
(i) Nouns and verbs
Homesigners use pointing gestures to refer to the objects,
people and places in their immediate surroundings. These
gestures function like demonstratives (this, that) and can
stand in for nouns in the children’s gesture sentences, for 5
example, point at jar—TWIST gesture ¼ that ( jar) twist. The
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demonstrative pointing gesture can be used to refer to any
entity that is present, and homesigners use their pointing ges-
tures to refer to the full range of entities that young hearing
children refer to with their words, e.g. people, inanimate
objects, body parts and places [58].
Homesigners use two additional devices to refer to entities.
They produce pointing gestures that refer not to the specific
object at the end of the point, but rather to the class of objects
that the indexed object belongs to. For example, a homesigner
points at the bubble jar, which is already open, and produces
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
an iconic TWIST gesture; he wants his mother to open the
bubble jar that she is holding, but he uses the (open) jar that
is near him to indicate the kind of object he wants opened.
These gestures are called category points, and homesigners
typically begin producing them later in development than
demonstrative points [59].
In addition to category points, homesigners also produce
iconic gestures (gestures that represent an aspect of an action
or object through pantomime) that function like nouns [60].
For example, a homesigner moved two fists as though steering
a car to describe a picture of a motionless car. When function-
ing as a noun, these gestures evoke a class of objects, rather
than a specific object (unless, of course, they are accompanied
by a pointing gesture). Homesigners tend to produce their first
iconic noun gestures during the same observation session in
which they first produce category points [59].
Homesigners also use their iconic gestures as verbs and
adjectives [60]. For example, a homesigner might use the
two-fisted STEER gesture to describe a scene in which a car is
being driven, or to ask that a toy animal drive a car; this ges-
ture is functioning like a verb. As another example, the child
forms a round circle with his fingers to describe the shape of a
penny; this gesture is functioning like an adjective.
The little that is known about the steps homesigners follow
in developing nouns and verbs comes from a case study of an
American homesigner, David [59,60]. David used all three
devices (demonstrative pointing gestures, category pointing
gestures and noun iconic gestures) to refer to entities, and also
used iconic gestures as verbs and adjectives, during his first
observation session at 2;10 (years;months).
The interesting developmental story is that, at all moments
during this developmental period, David maintained a distinc-
tion between his nouns and verbs, but used different devices to
do so over time. During the earliest period beginning at 2;10,
David predominantly used demonstrative pointing gestures
to refer to entities, but also used a few iconic noun gestures
and category pointing gestures. Interestingly, his iconic noun
gestures, which were potentially confusable with his iconic
verb gestures, were distinguished in two ways: (i) David
used different stems for his noun and verb iconic gestures;
for example, if he used the TWIST stem (C handshape þ rotate
motion) in a verb context to refer to twisting open a jar, he
did not use the TWIST stem in a noun context to refer to the jar
itself [60]. In other words, David had no noun–verb pairs con-
taining the same handshape þ motion stem. In this way, David
resembled English-learning children whose first uses of words
that can serve as both nouns and verbs were restricted to only
one use; for example, the child would use ‘comb’ as either a
verb (‘I comb hair’) or a noun (‘gimme comb’), but not both
[61]. (ii) In the noun and verb iconic gestures that David did
produce early in development, he used handshape to
 Downloaded from rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org on October 17, 2014
distinguish the two types of gestures: he used handling hand-
shapes in gestures used as verbs (i.e. the handshape
represented a hand as it holds an object, e.g. two fists held as
though beating a drum to refer to beating), but object hand-
shapes in gestures used as nouns (i.e. the handshape
represented features of the object itself, e.g. extending a flat
palm to refer to an oar) [62].
Between ages 3;3 and 3;5, David stopped distinguishing
between nouns and verbs in these particular ways; that is, he
no longer had a restriction on using the same handshape þ
motion stem in a noun–verb pair (e.g. he could now use the
TWIST stem to mean both twist and jar) [60], and he no longer
restricted handling handshapes to verbs and object handshapes
to nouns (e.g. he might use the two-fist handshape in a gesture
referring to a drum, and the flat-palm handshape in a gesture
referring to rowing) [62].3 But he developed new ways of
distinguishing between nouns and verbs—he tended to
abbreviate his noun gestures (e.g. he produced the drumming
movement fewer times when the gesture served as a noun
than when it served as a verb), and he tended to inflect his
verb gestures (e.g. he displaced the drumming movement
towards a drum, the patient, more often when the gesture
served as a verb than when it served as a noun) [60]. The
way in which the homesigner makes the noun– verb distinc-
tion thus appears to vary as a function of the complexity of
his homesign system.
(ii) Sentences
Homesigners combine gestures into strings and those gesture
strings display many of the properties found in the early
sentences produced by hearing children learning spoken
language and deaf children learning sign languages—
semantically their sentences convey the same types of
propositions, and syntactically their sentences are structured
at both underlying and surface levels [63]. In this sense,
homesigners’ gesture sentences warrant the label ‘sentence’.
Homesigners produce four types of action propositions in
their gesture sentences (the proposition was determined using
gesture form and context; see [57,63] for details): transitive
acts with a recipient or endpoint (I give cookie to you), transi-
tive acts without a recipient (I close box), intransitive acts with
a recipient or endpoint (I go outside) and intransitive acts with-
out a recipient (I dance); and six types of attribute propositions:
nominal predicates (this is a ball), descriptor relations (ball is
small), location relations (toaster is located in kitchen), possessive
relations (toy trains belong to me), similarity relations (cup 1
resembles cup 2) and picture identification relations (picture of
car resembles toy car).
The action proposition sentences homesigners produce
are characterized by an underlying predicate structure.
They produce sentences with a predicate and three argu-
ments (e.g. GIVE—point at self to mean you-give-me-apple),
sentences with a predicate and two arguments (e.g. point at
apple—EAT, to mean you-eat-apple, or point at exper-
imenter—MOVE to mean you-move-here) and sentences with a
predicate and one argument (e.g. point at dad—SLEEP to
mean dad-sleep). Evidence for these underlying structures
comes from the fact that the likelihood of producing a gesture
for a particular argument depended on the underlying
structure of the sentence (e.g. children were more likely to
produce a gesture for apple when it was part of a three-
element predicate frame, you-eat-apple, than when it was
part of a four-element predicate frame, you-give-me-apple, 6
simply because there was less competition among the
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underlying elements in a three-element frame than in a
four-element frame [64]. Interestingly, although the children,
at times, produced gestures for all of the elements in a predi-
cate frame, this was quite rare. In other words, the children
rarely fleshed out their predicate frames.
One additional point in relation to underlying structure is
worth making—it is the underlying predicate frame that
determines when a gesture for a particular argument (the
actor, for example) appears in surface structure, not how
easy it is to guess the actor from context. If predictability in
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
context were the key, first-person actors (the child him or her-
self ) and second-person actors (the communication partner)
should be omitted regardless of underlying predicate frame
because their identity can be easily guessed in context
(both persons are on the scene); and third-person actors
should be gestured quite often regardless of underlying pre-
dicate frame because they are less easily guessed from
context. However, Goldin-Meadow [64, p. 237] found that
the systematic decrease in actor production probability as
the number of potential arguments in underlying structure
increases (from 1-argument to 2-argument to 3-argument)
holds for first-person, for second-person and for third-
person actors when each is analysed separately. The predicate
frame underlying a sentence is thus an essential factor in
determining how often the actor (and other semantic
elements, e.g. the patient) will be gestured in that sentence.
In terms of the surface structure of the homesigners’ ges-
ture sentences, the elements that are explicitly gestured
follow consistent patterns of two types [63]: (i) production
probability patterns. Children are likely to produce gestures
for particular arguments in a predicate frame; for example,
they are more likely to produce a gesture for the patient,
drum, than for the agent, drummer, in a sentence conveying
the 3-element transitive predicate, beat. (ii) Gesture order pat-
terns. Children have preferred positions in which they place
gestures for particular arguments; for example, they tend to
produce gestures for patients before gestures for actions,
e.g. point at drum—BEAT.
Although homesigners do not typically flesh out their
predicates with gestures for additional arguments, they do
elaborate their sentences by adding a second clause, that is,
by constructing complex sentences containing two or more
propositions [65]. They typically produce clauses that are
coordinately conjoined (e.g. point at jar—GIVE—SHAKE to ask
the experimenter to give him a jar so that he can shake it),
but they can also produce a second clause that is subordinate
to the main clause (e.g. FLUTTER—FALL—point at boots—point
at skates—GLIDE, a comment indicating that we wear boots
and skate when snow flutters and falls; the when clause is
subordinate to the main clause). Importantly, the two-
clause complex sentences homesigners produce have also
been shown to have underlying predicate frames, providing
evidence for an overarching sentence node [65,66].
(iii) Complex nominal constituents
A second way in which homesigners elaborate their sentences is
to add complexity within a constituent, in particular, within the
nominal constituent. As mentioned earlier, homesigners refer to
entities by producing a demonstrative pointing gesture (point
at bird ¼ that) or an iconic noun gesture (flap palms at sides,
 Downloaded from rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org on October 17, 2014
BIRD ¼ bird). At times, however, the children combine demon-
strative pointing gestures with iconic noun gestures (e.g. point
at bird—BIRD—PEDAL, to describe a bird who is pedalling a
bicycle) to construct a complex nominal constituent, [[that bird]
pedals]. These combinations function semantically and syn-
tactically like complex nominal constituents in conventional
languages, and also function as a unit in terms of sentence
length (i.e. sentences containing complex nominal constituents
were longer than sentences the child would have been expected
to produce based on norms derived from the child’s gesture
sentences without complex nominal constituents [67].
Interestingly, homesigners tend to elaborate their sentences
first by adding a second clause (i.e. producing coordinate
sentences) and later by embedding information within a consti-
tuent (i.e. producing complex nominal constituents), whereas
children learning conventional spoken language show the
opposite pattern [68,69], even when they are learning spoken
languages that allow a great deal of noun omissions [59].
(iv) Narratives
Homesigners are able to use their gestures to recount stories, and
those gestured stories are of the same types, and of the same
structure, as those told by hearing children within their cul-
tures—they tell stories about positive events (e.g. emotional
gain), negative events (e.g. physical harm) and routine events.
In a study of narratives produced by four Chinese and four
American homesigners, Phillips, Goldin-Meadow and Miller
[70] found that all eight children produced at least one gesture
narrative, but varied greatly in the total number of narratives
they produced. Despite the variability in frequency of narration,
the homesigners displayed very similar structural patterns in
their narratives. All eight children elaborated upon the basic nar-
rative, including setting information and voluntary actions in their
stories. Some children in each cultural group went further and
produced narratives containing a complication and temporal order
as well. Moreover, the two children who produced enough narra-
tives to discern a developmental pattern (one Chinese and one
American homesigner) advanced their narrative skill by adding
one feature at a time in a manner consistent with descriptions
of the developmental patterns seen in hearing children [71,72].
The narratives experienced by children who are exposed to
a language model are saturated with cultural meanings; they
provide cues about how to interpret experience, about what
is valued, about what counts as a narratable event [73–76].
Unable to hear the verbal narratives that surround them, home-
signers do not have full access to the socializing messages
narratives provide. Nonetheless, their narratives bear echoes
of culture-specific meaning. For example, Chinese homesigners
use evaluative comments in their narratives more often than
American homesigners, thus mirroring the cultural patterns
found in Chinese and American hearing children learning to
tell stories from a spoken language model [70]. Homesigners
can thus produce culturally appropriate narrations despite
their lack of a verbal language model, suggesting that these
particular cultural messages are accessible through non-
verbal channels and are thus so important that they are not
entrusted to a single medium.
(b) Homesign is the first step towards an established
sign language
We have seen that homesigning children have gesture sys-
tems that contain many of the basic properties found in all
natural languages. But child homesign is not a full-blown 7
language, and for good reason. The children are inventing
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their gesture systems on their own without a community of
communication partners. Indeed, when homesign children
were brought together after the first school for the deaf was
opened in Nicaragua in the late 1970s, their gesture systems
began to cohere into a recognized and shared language.
That language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), became
increasingly complex, particularly after a new generation of
deaf children learned the system as a native language [77].
The circumstances in Nicaragua permit us to go beyond
uncovering skills children bring to language learning to gain
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
insight into where those skills fall short; that is, to discover
which properties of language are so fragile that they cannot
be developed by a child lacking access to a conventional
language model [78]. By comparing current day child home-
signers in Nicaragua with groups whose circumstances have
allowed them to go beyond child homesign, we can begin to
develop hypotheses about which properties of language are
fragile, and which conditions foster the development of these
relatively fragile properties (hypotheses that will then need
to be tested using other approaches, e.g. artificial language
learning studies). We begin by observing changes made to
the system when it remains the homesigner’s sole means
of communication into adulthood [79,80]. Studying adult
homesigners allows us to explore the impact that cognitive
and social maturity have on linguistic structure. We can also
observe changes made to the system when it becomes a
community-wide language as homesigners come together for
the first time [81,82]. Studying the signers who originated
NSL allows us to explore the impact that a community in
which signers not only produce, but also receive their com-
munication, has on linguistic structure. Finally, we can observe
changes made to the system when it is passed through sub-
sequent generations of learners [83,84]. Studying generations
of NSL signers allows us to explore the impact that passing a
newly birthed language through new learners has on linguistic
structure. In addition, as a backdrop, we can study the gestures
that hearing speakers produce, with speech [85] and without it
[80,86], to better understand the raw materials out of which
these newly emerging linguistic systems have risen.
The sign language that is evolving in Nicaragua gives us
the opportunity to watch language as it grows. For example,
Goldin-Meadow et al. [87] charted the development of hand-
shape use in nouns versus verbs in three Nicaraguan groups:
(i) adult homesigners who were not part of the deaf com-
munity and used their own homesigns to communicate;
(ii) NSL cohort 1 signers who fashioned the first stages of
NSL and (iii) NSL cohort 2 signers who learned NSL from
cohort 1. In addition, they compared handshapes produced
by these three groups with those produced by (iv) native sign-
ers of ASL, an established sign language. They focused on
handshapes in classifier verbs, which are part of a productive
classifier system in ASL and thus ought to vary across agent
(e.g. someone moves a pen) versus no-agent (the pen moves
on its own) contexts, unlike the nouns in their study, which
were frozen lexical items. They found that all of the groups,
including homesigners, used the same handshape form in
both an agent and a no-agent context more often when label-
ling the object (e.g. the noun for pen) than when describing the
event (e.g. the verb for moving); that is, there was less variabil-
ity across contexts in noun handshape forms than in verb
handshape forms. Importantly, the variability found in verbs
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was systematic, as it ought to be if the verbs are functioning
like classifier predicates—all groups used object handshapes
when describing no-agent events, but used both handling
and object handshapes when describing agent events. In con-
trast to these grammatical properties, which are already
present in homesign, stability in noun forms does not appear
to be a linguistic property that an individual will necessarily
develop without pressure from a peer linguistic commu-
nity—individual homesigners used a number of different
handshapes to label a particular object, whereas NSL and
ASL signers tended to use only one.
The manual modality can thus take on linguistic proper-
ties, even in the hands of a young child not yet exposed to
a conventional language model. But it grows into a full-
blown language only with the support of a community that
can transmit the system to the next generation. Examining
the steps a manual communication system takes as it moves
towards becoming a fully-fledged sign language offers a
unique window onto factors that have made human language
what it is.
4. Does gesture contribute another modality to
learning or another representational format?
Signers of established sign languages like ASL gesture when they
sign [8], but their gestures are produced in the same modality as
their signs. Their utterances therefore do not constitute a multi-
modality expression. However, those utterances do contain
more than one representational format—an analogue format
underlying gesture, and a discrete segmented format underlying
sign [88–90], comparable to the analogue format that underlies
the gestures that accompany speech, and the discrete format
that underlies the speech itself [1,2]. In this section, we take
another look at gesture’s role in learning [91] and ask whether
what is key about gesture in this role is that it adds a second
modality (i.e. it adds the manual to the oral4) or that it adds a
second representational format (i.e. it adds the analogue to
the discrete). To address this question, we turn to children
who are native signers who studied in a learning context.
As there are currently no relevant studies examining
language learning in young signers, we turn to learning in
a different domain—mathematical equivalence—and in
older children—9- to 10-year-olds.
There is evidence that gesture plays the same role, at least
in some respects, in older math-learners as it does in younger
word-learners. As described earlier, when examined in
relation to speech, gesture can predict early linguistic mile-
stones in hearing children learning a spoken language; for
example, a child who produces an utterance containing a ges-
ture that conveys different information from the information
conveyed in the speech (‘mama’ þ point at bottle, to indicate
that mom is preparing a bottle) is on the cusp of producing
two-word utterances (‘mama bottle’) and is likely to do so
within three months [17]. We find the same effect in older
children asked to solve a math task. Consider, for example
a child asked to solve the problem 4 þ 2 þ 6 ¼ __ þ 6. The
child puts 12 in the blank and has thus (incorrectly) solved
the problem using an add-to-equal-sign strategy. When
asked to explain her solution, she says, ‘I added the 4, the 2
and the 6’, while pointing at the 4, the 2, the 6 on the left
side of the equation and the 6 on the right side of the
equation, and then says, ‘to get 12’, while pointing at the 12
in the blank—she has conveyed an add-to-equal-sign strategy 8
in speech (4 þ 2 þ 6) but an add-all-numbers strategy in
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gesture (4 þ 2 þ 6 þ 6). The child has thus conveyed dif-
ferent information in her gestures from what she conveyed
in her speech, a gesture–speech mismatch. Importantly, chil-
dren who produce many gesture–speech mismatches on the
math task are likely to learn how to solve the problem after a
math lesson—more likely than children who do not produce
gesture–speech mismatches on the problem [92,93]. This
effect has also been found in children learning to solve conser-
vation problems [94], in children learning to solve balance
problems [95] and in adults learning to solve stereoisomer
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295
problems in chemistry [96].
Gesture–speech mismatches juxtapose two different ideas
within a single response. Is juxtaposing different ideas across
two modalities essential for gesture–speech mismatch to predict
increased learning? If so, then mismatch between sign and
gesture (i.e. mismatch within one modality) should not predict
learning in signers, unlike mismatch between speech and
gesture (i.e. mismatch across two modalities), which does
predict learning in speakers. Alternatively, it may be the
representational formats within which different ideas are con-
veyed that are responsible for mismatch predicting learning.
If so, juxtaposing different ideas across two distinct repre-
sentational formats regardless of modality should be key,
and mismatching gesture should predict learning in signers
as well as speakers.
Goldin-Meadow et al. [97] explored this question in 40 ASL-
signing deaf children and found, first, that the child signers
produced gestures along with their signed explanations as
often as hearing children produced gestures along with their
spoken explanations on these problems. Moreover, the signers
produced gesture–sign mismatches as often as the hearing
children produced gesture–speech mismatches. For example,
on the problem 5 þ 9 þ 2 ¼ __ þ 2, one signer produced the
(incorrect) ‘add-to-equal-sign’ strategy in sign (FOURTEEN, ADD,
TWO, ANSWER, SIXTEEN, i.e. the child indicated that the three num-
bers on the left side of the equation should be added (14, which
is the sum of 5 þ 9, plus 2) and the sum, 16, put in the blank).
At the same time, she produced a gesture indicating the two
unique numbers on the left side of the equation (5 þ 9) and
no other numbers, thus conveying the (correct) ‘grouping’
strategy (i.e. group and add 5 and 9) in gesture. As another
example, on the problem 7 þ 4 þ 2 ¼ 7 þ __, another signer
produced the (incorrect) ‘add-to-equal-sign’ strategy in sign
(ADD7þ4þ2, PUT13, i.e. an ADD sign produced over the 7, 4 and 2
on the left side of the equation, and a PUT sign produced over
the 13 in the blank). At the same time, she produced gestures
conveying the (correct) ‘add-subtract’ strategy (indexing ges-
tures at the 7, the 4 and the 2 on the left side of the equation,
combined with a take-away gesture over the 7 on the right
side of the equation, i.e. add up all of the numbers on the left
side of the problem and subtract the number on the right).
Even more important from the point of view of our discus-
sion here, the more gesture–sign mismatches signers produced
in their problem-solving explanations prior to instruction, the
more likely they were to profit from the lesson and solve
the problems successfully after instruction [97]. It thus appears
to be gesture’s ability to introduce a second representational
format that is key to its success in predicting learning—
mismatch can predict learning whether the categorical
information is conveyed in the manual (sign) or oral (speech)
modality. However, these findings leave open the possibility
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that the analogue information must be conveyed in the manual (insight that is difficult to come by when we look only at chil- 9
modality. The manual modality may be privileged when it dren acquiring spoken language under typical learning

comes to expressing emergent or mimetic ideas, perhaps
because our hands are an important vehicle for discovering
properties of the world [98–100].
As a final caveat, it is important to point out that the ges-
tures the deaf and hearing children produce along with the
math explanations are different from the kinds of gestures
that children produce in the early stages of language learning.
The learning task facing the pre-linguistic child is language
itself. When gesture is used in these early stages, it is used as
an assist into the linguistic system, substituting for words
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conditions), and into the factors that can lead to the emer-
gence of fully complex, conventional linguistic systems.
Finally, when we widen the lens on conventional sign
languages to include gesture, we can address a question that
cannot be examined looking solely at spoken language. The
representational formats displayed across two modalities in
speakers—the categorical in the oral modality (speech) and
the analogue in the manual modality (gesture)—appear in
one modality in signers—the categorical (sign) and the ana-
logue (gesture), both in the manual modality. Nevertheless,

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369: 20130295

that the child has not yet acquired. But once the basics of
language have been mastered, children are free to use gesture
for other purposes—in particular, to help them grapple with
new ideas in other cognitive domains, ideas that are often not
easily translated into a single lexical item. As a result, although
gesture conveys ideas that do not fit neatly into speech
throughout development, we might expect to see a transition
in the kinds of ideas that gesture conveys as children become
proficient language users. Initially, children use gesture as a
substitute for the words they cannot yet express. Later, once
they master language and other learning tasks present them-
selves, they use gesture to express more global ideas that do
not fit neatly into word-like units [2].
we find that gesturing in signers predicts learning just as gestur-
ing in speakers does, suggesting that what matters for learning
is the presence of two representational formats (analogue and
categorical), rather than two modalities (manual and oral).
What is ultimately striking about children is that they are
able to use resources from either the manual or the oral moda-
lity to communicate in distinctively human ways. When other
vehicles are not available, the manual modality can assume lin-
guistic forms and functions and be language. But when either
speech or sign is available, the manual modality becomes part
of language, providing an additional representational format
that helps promote learning. As researchers, we too need to
use resources from both the manual and the oral modalities
to fully understand language, learning and cognition.

5. Conclusion Funding statement. Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by

Widening the lens on language to include the manual modality
has given us a deeper understanding of language learning
and learning in general. Hearing children who are acquiring
spoken language use gesture along with speech to communi-
cate, and those gesture þ word combinations precede, and
predict, the acquisition of word þ word combinations convey-
ing the same notions. These findings make it clear that children
have an understanding of these notions before they are able to
express them in speech, thus eliminating one frequently held
explanation for the slow acquisition of certain structures—the
cognitive explanation, that is, that children do not express a
given structure because they lack an understanding of the
notion underlying the structure. Widening our lens to include
the manual modality thus allows insight into when cognition
does, and does not, shape the course of language learning.
We have also seen that when a child is prevented from
using the oral modality, that child can fall back on the
manual modality, creating gestures that assume many of
the forms and functions of language. These homemade ges-
ture systems constitute the first step in the emergence of a
manual sign system, which can, under the right circum-
stances, become a fully-fledged language. Widening the
lens to include the manual modality thus allows insight
into the skills children themselves bring to language learning
grant no. R01 DC00491 from NIDCD, grant nos. R01 HD47450 and
P01 HD40605 from NICHD and grant no. SBE 0541957 from NSF
to the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (the author is a co-PI).
Endnotes
1
Estigarribia & Clark [18] have found that pointing gestures attract
and maintain attention in talk differently from iconic (or, in their
terms, demonstrating) gestures, which may account for the fact that
pointing gestures predict the onset of nouns, but iconic gestures do
not predict the onset of verbs.
2
This selectivity can be seen in the fact that the onset of complemen-
tary point þ noun combinations ( point at box þ ‘box’) predicted the
onset of determiner þ noun combinations (‘the box’) in these 18 chil-
dren, but not the onset of two-word combinations containing a verb
(e.g. ‘open box’), which is predicted by the onset of supplementary
gesture þ speech combinations ( point at box þ ‘open’) [34].
3
Interestingly, David treated iconic gestures serving two different
noun functions in precisely the same way with respect to hand-
shape—he used object handshapes in iconic gestures that serve a
nominal predicate function (e.g. that’s a bird), as well as in iconic ges-
tures that serve a nominal argument function (e.g. that bird pedals).
This pattern suggests that noun is an overarching category in
David’s homesign system—an important finding in itself.
4
Although facial gestures have less potential for transparency than
manual gestures, they may also offer a second window onto a speak-
er’s thoughts and thus predict learning.

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